:Title: Deep Community :Author: Linda ทรัพยากร Nowakowski (CCAL30) :Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:29:14 PDT :URL: http://www.omidyar.net/user/u986781302/news/51/ Almost 3 weeks ago now, I went into Bangkok and attended a lecture by Peter Hurst. Peter is the retired Vice President of Academic Affairs at Naropa University (The only Buddhist University in the US and in Boulder, Colorado of all places!) After his retirement, Peter and his family came to Thailand for 6 months for Peter to have the opportunity to help Mahidol University set up a graduate program in Contemplative Education. Deep community - contemplative education....weird things. But what did you expect? This is my personal news! Contemplative education is a philosophy of higher education that infuses learning with the experience of awareness, insight and compassion for oneself and others through the practice of meditation and contemplative disciplines. Contemplative education integrates the best of Eastern and Western educational traditions, helping students know themselves more deeply and engage constructively with others. “The point is not to abandon scholarship but to ground it, to personalize it and to balance it with the fundamentals of mind training, especially the practice of sitting meditation so that inner development and outer knowledge go hand in hand. . . . A balanced education cultivates abilities beyond the verbal and conceptual to include matters of heart, character, creativity, self-knowledge, concentration, openness and mental flexibility.” —Judy Lief, former Naropa University president These excerpts from Wikipedia give you a little better idea of what this concept is. Deep community is a term that Dr. Hurst uses to describe community that provides you with the space and support to do personal work as the group does what ever tasks it has, be they learning as in contemplative education, or doing strategic university planning as in one of his lecture examples. As he was defining this concept in the first lecture I heard, I realized that he was describing an Asoke community. For those of you who haven't been following my `PhD work`_ briefly, this is a Thai Buddhist community that has changed my life. .. _`PhD work` : http://www.omidyar.net/group/coffee/ Since then, I have spent a couple of days with Dr. Hurst and I expect that over the coming years I will spend more. We invited him to visit us here in Ubon, give a lecture (to pay his way!) and go with us to visit a couple of Asoke communities. He agreed with my assessment and I believe he will be coming back to study how these communities work. Dr. Hurst has provided a huge missing piece in my current jigsaw puzzle. Sufficiency Economies are first and foremost economic entities. It is a form of development philosophy that provides safety and a mind set that can enable safe growth. With the child-headed households project at Opok Farms we want to provide that safety and springboard to future development for them. But how to do it for children? And not really just any children. Children who have been damaged with the war and with the effects of HIV/AIDS. Children who have been saddled with the responsibilities of adults. Persons who were one day children themselves and are the next day in charge of all of the littler ones in the family with no gradual build up that gives them time to acquire the necessary wisdom. We had realized the importance of finding the right adults to fill in this community. People who could in some sense act as parents to an extended family. I had realized the importance of intentionally building a supportive community. One where education had to be way more than the 3Rs. Having a Sufficiency Economy community requires (I think) a change of perspective. You need to see the long range not just the short range. This philosophy is about understanding needs versus wants. It is about understanding how everything is interconnected - what happens to you, changes what happens to me; what you do to nature changes nature on the other side of the globe. Good concepts I think but not your typical "kid" mentality. Where do we learn abut those concepts? Where do we learn good and bad and right and wrong? Mostly, I think (I think a lot these days and realize how little I know.), we learn them from our families. From those people who have gone ahead of us and experienced more and hopefully developed some wisdom. Sometimes those families are extended - sometimes all the way to a community - but that part is seldom recognized. How do we have children teaching values when they have little experience with living and no remaining role models? So, yesterday I went out looking for information on values education. I found lots of stuff. I even found a lot of good stuff (Living Values - a program developed for the UN). OK...like my life these days and like most good things I think, the path is not straight or narrow. We need to wander off across the plain of my work and look at the work I have been having to do on selecting a methodology for my research. My previous education has all been in the hard sciences. This venture into the social sciences is a strange journey. I have had to go and study the tried and true research methodologies that have been used by other researchers in the social studies over the years. This helps define how you will approach your research; defines the style and helps focus on the techniques you will use and how you will frame your questions. After a lot of reading I kind of felt pretty comfortable with Participatory Action Research. It's nice and fuzzy and instead of looking at a path that is a straight line from A to Z with all of the intermediate (B,C,D....) questions to be answered, it is more like wandering around in a spiral.You ask a question, contemplate it, figure something out, try it, stop, look and evaluate and start all over again. That sounds like it was designed for me! Perfect fit! (take a long broad jump back to where we were before) As I was laying in bed last night trying to put the clutter on the desk of my mind in some order so I could go to sleep, I realized that the main task ahead of me (us) in setting up a sufficiency economy farming community at Opok Farms is to build a deep community. A community where everyone is working together on projects (farming and what ever other businesses develop out of that) that will provide them some economic safety and basic security of existence while at the same time providing the children the support and a place where they can all do the self work involved in growing up, healing and becoming the most glorious people they can become. That requires looking at who the people will be who do that community building work. Ultimately, it will be the community itself, but who helps them learn the tools to do that? Are they active, full-time members of the community or are they outside support people? Where do they learn how to do this work? I think it was Peter Drucker who said something like if it can't be measured it can't be managed. How do we measure progress in this work so that we know what needs to be tweeked when? I think I have an idea to work on for the talk Aj. Apichai wants me to present an the 3rd. International Gross National Happiness Conference. Only a month to get that paper written....arggh... Off to the faculty!